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If you will go to Pixar's Renderman program suite and request admission to their 3-D program, they will let you download their whole file. You must be polite and honest...let them know that sleep behind the Burger King! Kirk Carter/ Burbank, Ca.

I was curious on this as I have my own animation project to be animated and checked out Pixar's Renderman. It's supposed to be freely available for non-commercial purposes. All righty then, sounds nice to me, but what actually is RenderMan..? Quote from Pixar's web page: "RenderMan is advanced technology for shading, lighting, and rendering. RenderMan _is not_ an animation or modeling package." "RenderMan can be plugged into one of the following tools, Maya, Houdini, Katana, or Cinema4D. If you use one of those packages you can try RenderMan." "RenderMan by itself does not have a user interface or GUI." This means that it's just a rendering engine plug-in for animation/rendering software, you also need the actual (commercial) software package to make any use of it. So, if you are on a tight (no) budget and looking for freeware, then Blender seems to be the only way to go?

@Risto: Blender is the only free decent 3d package I know of. Blender has 2 built-in render engines of its own, or you can use it with RenderMan. RenderMan requires your project to be non-commercial however if you choose to use that. There are quite a few other open source render engines out there as well that don't have such a restriction, but the ones already built-in to Blender work the best for an animation project. Others like Octane, Luxrender, or Yafray are designed more for still image photorealism rendering. Blender has "Blender Internal", its older render engine, which is no longer being updated, but still maintained. It also has a new engine, Cycles, which is designed to be sort of in between those photorealism "unbiased" render engines and one that works well for animation. They make improvements constantly on it which are included in Blender's bi-monthly releases. I'm finding it more and more useful. But I still like the older Blender Internal engine because it allows for a lot more cheating, which is invaluable on an animation project where render times add up quickly. I'm not sure how technically savvy or familiar you are with the animation or 3D process, but Blender is a really versatile program. http://blendercookie.com and http://blenderguru.com are a couple of sites with a lot of free tutorials for it. I'd also recommend checking out the open movies that were made by the Blender Institute. Just Google "Sintel", "Elephants Dream", "Big Buck Bunny", or "Tears of Steal". And they're making another one right now code-named Project Gooseberry. These were all designed to push the development of the software forward by creating practical production challenges to overcome. And there's also a lot of great behind the scenes and tutorials that go along with each of those projects too.

Here's a link to Sintel, one of the open movies made by the Blender Institute: http://youtu.be/eRsGyueVLvQ Caminandes was another smaller project made this past year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4C82eyhwgU These were both made in relatively short period of time (less than a year) with small teams of artists. Also important to mention that they had developers involved to fix bugs with the software and make improvements or changes as per the artist request. An advantage of using an open source program to make your movie is, if you do have developers on hand, which are good to have around anyway, you can easily make changes to the software if you have a specific problem you need to solve. Even if you don't have programmers or know how to code, I've gotten some simple changes made to Blender just by talking to people that are involved in development. En Passant is another good one made with Blender by an independent group of artists: http://youtu.be/w7HI1Ujx7B8

Lightwave 11.5 can do animation in real time from multiple motion captured actors which can significantly lower costs. Models can be purchased and easily rigged. This is no longer a multi-million dollar venture and has become available to many independent producers. So you might want to find someone familiar with the technology in your area. Personally, I have engineered equipment to capture 4 actors and their voices in real time using just 2 PCs.

Pixar has just come out with a quality animated program which you can rent on a download with a credit card...I did a piece that would have normally taken me three days to do in about 20 minutes...just look them up...good people to work with!

Hi, if you are looking to outsource your post production work on your project, please let us know, we can offer you quality output that wont break your bank. Our Digital Graphics Studios is in the Philippines. Thank you....we can also collaborate with you in making this a reality, we have 2D/3D Animation and VFX department that can work with you on your project, we can create storyboards and make sketches to match your story, if you're interested e mail me at dslauchang@widesourceglobal.com